Inventing Angels

Gary Fincke

I love Gary Fincke's poetry as much as I like his memoirs. (And I'm hard-pressed to think of another memoir I've read in my lifetime I liked as much as I did Amp'd: A Father's Backstage Pass.) In fact, I've done a lot of poetry reading over the past month or so-- perhaps more in a more concentrated fashion than at any time since my graduation from college-- and Fincke's book, which is the best of the eight I've read in the past two weeks, got me to thinking what it is that makes a good poem. Not that I haven't done a lot of thinking about this in the past, as a poet myself. (I've even got a set of widely-published, and widely-mocked, Ten Commandments of Poetry.) But I've always looked at this from the point of view of a creator, rather than that of simply a reader. The wide array of different styles of poetry that have come across my desk in this short period got me thinking from the reader's perspective about what it is, specifically, that makes Inventing Angels better, in varying degrees, than the other eight books of poetry (of widely varying quality) I've read recently. Granted, I'm working with a remarkably small sample size, but I do have a lot more poetry reading in the past to draw on. I'd still like to offer up a very tentative first draft of an explication of what makes a poem good, with a far more concrete and assured explication of what makes these poems good. (Needless to say, this will laugh at Amazon's thousand-word guideline; I beg your indulgence.)

The first aspect is the same as the first rule for writing good poetry: show, don't tell. Wilde's "all bad poetry is sincere" and Williams' "no ideas but in things" are two of the great maxims of the poetic world, but both writers and readers affect a sort of willful ignorance toward their existence. I don't understand why; this maxim extends to every art, and the same people who are willing to defend to the death Maya Angelou's right to call her pathetic political screed "poetry" are often the same ones who watch these very rules in action on American Idol every season. And they can't see the crossover.

"...Tourist,

White collar, I've lost the lust for sausage,
For anchovies that send out for beer,
But here where I park is someone, drunk,
Who might have swallowed thirty years
Of Armco steel, enough soot and smoke

To keep him thirsty for the rest
Of his laid-off life...."
(from "Booths")

You give people the concrete details. The ideas will come through.

Second is a balance between the shallow and the deep. Poetry thrives on multiple meanings. There are some poets, quite popular ones even, who write poems that are almost all surface meaning (Charles Bukowski, for example), leading to a complete lack of rereadability or analysis, and there are some poets who write poems that are all depth (Seamus Heaney, for example), whose work will require a marathon session of analysis before you've figured out the meaning of the first symbol. Allow yourself a personal library of symbols, which come with built-in analytical qualities, but for god's sake don't allow them to move in and take up shop in the frontal lobe. After a while, no one will be able to figure out what it is you're saying. There has to be a surface layer, an accessibility that will let the casual reader look at the poem once and still take something away from it.

"The local color of pulpit logic:
In this Genesis Noah, too, had come
To rest in Wisconsin, running aground
For man's second anachronistic chance,
And though those midwest mountains diminished
The Flood, Van Slyke had followers who liked
The idea of being poinpointed
On paradise..."
(from "Throwing the Voice")

Third, and perhaps most subjective: someone wiser than I (whose name, unfortunately, I cannot find in google searches, so the quote will remain unattributed) once defined poetry as "elevated language." This is, of course, the case; were it not, anyone could write anything they wanted, break it up into little lines, and call it poetry. (Many small-press magazine editors will, of course, attest that most people who submit work to them do, in fact, consider the latter a more viable definition of poetry.) The trick, I think, is to elevate the language without sending it spiraling up into the lofty realms of the stratosphere where mortal folks can't breathe. A lot of people come down hard on Bukowski for being a bit loose with his language, and in many of his poems they're absolutely right to do so; look at the best stuff, though, and you'll see that Buk had something like a phrasebook in his head, a grammar text that none of the rest of us had access to, and that by his own rules he was practicing something akin to strict formalism. (He cleverly hid it, however, by pumping out crap as well, but that's beside the point.) Elevation is kind of like morality; everyone has his own definition, and as long as you stick to yours, it's hard to find a good reason to criticize. It does, however, seem better for all involved if one's definition of elevation still stays relatively low to the ground, just like it seems better for all involved if one's definition of morality does not include "mass murder is good."

"The first evening of war, an hour
After firemen snatched our dinner
From the oven to fling it outside,
We watched a map of the Middle East
As if it were animated,
Those newsmen doing voice-overs
From countries so sure to suffer
The black blast of cartoon mayhem."
(from "The Ignition Point of Paper")

So, in summation, keep it concrete, (somewhat, not too much) elevated, and accessible without being shallow, and you've got yourself a good poem. Put a set of good poems together and you've got Inventing Angels.